by Ninie Hammon
The dark and the sound ate up his world.
Chapter Five
Sam Sheridan was a big girl. Oh, not heavy. All long arms and legs as a child, she grew up to be slender and willowy — and to stand just over six feet tall in flat-heeled shoes, and she always wore flats. Her height had propelled her into the prestigious starting center spot on the Nower County High School girls’ basketball team back in the day. Some of the best memories of her life came from that time, the thump-thump of the ball on the hardwood, the sound of shoes squeaking, and the smell of girl sweat and deodorant and damp hairspray. The “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” That kind of thing. And she’d felt in control of her life then, strong and competent, in a way she had not felt since.
Look out, world
You best run
We’re the class of ‘81
Two more classes graduated from the school before they closed it down and bussed the kids into Carlisle in Beaufort County to a regional high school. Two years after that, they’d done the same thing with the elementary school — the year before Rusty was supposed to start kindergarten they’d shut the place down.
When Sam had graduated, the name “Martha Ann Sheridan” was printed on the diploma. In first grade, somebody’d noticed that the initials MAS backwards was SAM. So “Sam” had happened and stuck. After high school, life had happened, and Rusty — Russell! — had happened, and her waitress job at the Me N’ Todd’s Whistle Stop Cafe and Grill was in danger of becoming her career path to … well, to nowhere. But she saw that one coming and dodged the bullet. Though she’d never said as much to anybody except her best friend in elementary school, Sam had always dreamed of becoming a doctor. That wasn’t going to happen to the fourth child of eight in the family of an often out-of-work coal miner. She downshifted her sights to registered nurse, RN. Then downshifted again. She’d had to scratch and claw her way through night school, but she’d managed to earn her LPN — became a Licensed Professional Nurse, which had landed her the position as the home health care nurse with the State Department of Human Resources for the tri-county area that included Nower, Beaufort and Drayton counties.
It was that job that had sent Sam to the Dollar General Store at the crossroads this morning. On your feet all day, you better have the right kind of shoes. She splurged on shoes when she asked for no other luxuries. New Balance Women’s WC806 D-width tennis shoes — size 10 — that cost almost $75 at Landon’s Shoe Store in Carlisle. They might be cheaper somewhere in Lexington, but Sam didn’t have time to chase all over Lexington looking for shoes. Her New Balance were strictly for work, which was why she’d come to the Dollar General Store this morning to pick up a pair of cheaper Adidas or Fila to wear when she mowed the grass.
Rusty’s Air Jordans had similar restricted use and he was scrupulously careful with them. The boy would go barefoot before he’d wear an off brand — what he called buddy shoes — to school.
Tall wasn’t Sam’s only striking attribute, though it was the one that suited her personality best. When she was waiting tables, she had zero tolerance for men who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves and being bigger than most of them helped her set up what she called her boundary of respect. Every man who had ever dared to cross that boundary had been very, very sorry he had.
She had an open, inviting face with a high wide forehead, just shy of pretty, though a big smile tipped the scales, and she was seldom without one of those. Her voice was surprisingly husky, kind of a startling rumble, that made her memorable — if her height and strawberry blonde hair hanging straight almost to her waist hadn’t already chiseled her image into your psyche.
The shopping basket she’d picked up by the Dollar General Store front door was almost filled by the big shoe box. She should have gotten a cart because a stop at the Dollar Store always awakened the tiny voices of a whole list of sorta-kinda necessary items all shouting in unison in their tinny voices, “pick me, pick me!”
Dishwashing detergent. When she’d squeezed the bottle last night over the frying pan, nothing had come out but a dribble of blue liquid and bubbles. Steak sauce. She didn’t use it on steak, of course, but Rusty loved to put it on Spam.
Rusty. That reminded her. The boy needed socks — white tube socks with the stripes at the top always in different colors so you eventually had a pile of lone soldiers in the unmatched-sock sack.
Toilet paper. She had several rolls, but standing before her in a huge display were bundles of six — on sale. No reason not to stock up. Far as she could remember, she’d never had a roll of toilet paper go bad on her.
Gummy bear vitamins. Not for Rusty, for Sam! Hair scrunchies that the magazine in the dentist’s office waiting room proclaimed were woefully out of vogue but she had to have something to keep all that hair out of her face. Flashlight batteries — or buy candles. One or the other. She passed on the display billed as a “bigger, better mousetrap,” though the one she used now was the laughingstock of the whole mouse population of the county.
Her basket was full to overflowing when she started to the checkout counter and when a packet of tube socks made a break for it, taking a swan dive off the top of the shoebox, the resulting avalanche was unpreventable.
Abigail Clayton appeared at Sam’s side and began helping her pick up what she’d dropped.
Abby was Sam’s physical opposite. Where Sam was tall and lithe and moved with the grace of a former athlete, Abby was short and as boney/frail as a baby bird that didn’t yet have feathers. Her shock of unruly hair was an untamable mass of curly frizz a color Sam’s mother would have dubbed dishwater blonde.
She handed Sam the shoebox containing the size-ten sneakers.
“I could about put both my feet in one of them shoes,” she said, indicating the maybe-a–size-five feet on the ends of her skinny white legs. She was wearing pink plastic flip-flops. One bore the face of Beauty and the other of the Beast from the children’s movie. “I mostly wear kids’ shoes. They fit fine and they’re cheaper than grownup sizes.”
The girl’s face still bore a red flush from the adolescent acne that had made her skin look like ground meat only a couple of years ago. She was nobody’s definition of attractive, but she was beautiful today, totally beaming.
“Lordy, girl, the glow on your face is warm enough to melt frost off a windowpane,” Sam said, and the smile Sam would have bet couldn’t possibly get wider did — so wide across the bottom of Abby’s face if the ends connected in the back, the top of her head would fall off.
“I got ever-thing in the world to smile ‘bout. Gonna be bringing my Cody home this mornin’.”
That was big news.
Abby had grown up so far back in some hollow the sun probably didn’t shine there more than a couple of days a week. Her father was a disabled coal miner and Sam had no idea how many brothers and sisters she had — but it was a bunch. She did know that the oldest, Claude, was locked up somewhere in a mental hospital, judged incompetent to stand trial for hacking his druggie roommates to death with a meat cleaver.
Abigail Letcher and Shepherd Clayton quit school at sixteen — the legal age to do so, and almost seventy percent of the high school students availed themselves of that privilege — and got married. They moved into a little rental house off Swords Creek Road in Poorfolk Hollow that at least had running water. No indoor plumbing, though, literally didn’t have “a pot to piss in,” but they were young and stupid and didn’t know their circumstances should have made them miserable. Sam knew Abby’s story because one of her many sisters cut Sam’s hair at the Hair Affair Beauty Parlor and Nail Salon on Main Street in Carlisle.
“She was so excited when she got pregnant you’d have thought she’s the first female on the face of the earth ever had a baby,” her sister Ramona had said, as she ran Sam’s wet hair through her fingers and told Sam for the umpteen-billionth time how she’d trade out her black hair for Sam’s red any day. “Then she got that pre-something.”
Pre-eclampsia.
That had put her to bed, and Shep’d had to cut his work hours back as far as they’d let him at the storm-door factory in Lexington, which was an hour-and-a-half commute from Nower County. Abby had become one of Sam’s circuit of home-bound patients for a time, and then the baby came early, had what Ramona called “all kind of preemie troubles,” and the child remained for several months in the hospital’s neonatal unit — while the couple racked up medical debt, the numbers getting bigger and bigger every day, faster than the numbers on a gasoline pump when you fill up the tank.
“This here’s the first time I been home in two months, spent ever day and ever night with Cody. But Shep’s with him now and I come home to get his room all ready.”
She grinned, displaying crooked teeth that had likely never been in the presence of a dentist.
“Shep sent me home to get a good night’s sleep in my own bed last night because I ain’t likely to be getting much sleep from now on. Cody being so little and all, you got to feed him ever two hours ‘round the clock.”
She looked suddenly shy.
“I been, you know, pumpin’ … feeding it to him outa a bottle because at first he was too weak to suck. But this morning when I get there, I ain’t gonna be giving him that last bottle. I’m gonna nurse him. Nurse my baby for the first time.”
That was special. Sam remembered nursing Rusty.
“Shoot, I might as well have gone on back to the hospital when I got done last night because I didn’t sleep a wink.”
“Yeah, that was some storm!” Sam had never seen anything like it.
“Oh, wasn’t the storm kept me awake. Just, you know, the jitters. I would have got in the truck and went on back but I told my sister Eva Joan I’d stop by on my way up Lexington this morning — she lives in Frogtown so it ain’t much out of the way — to fetch them cloth diapers she’s been collecting for me. Me and Shep can’t afford them disposables.”
“Good thing you wasn’t lookin’ to buy no diapers here,” said the bored teenage checker, who needed to wash her hair and stop snapping her bubble gum. “We ain’t got none. Delivery truck didn’t show up this morning.”
Abby put the pack of preemie onesies on the checkout counter.
“Pour little thing ain’t got no clothes that fit — even these preemies is too big, but I’m gonna fatten him up quick as I can, nurse him ever ten minutes if that’s what he wants.” She opened her purse and pulled from it a little snap-shut change purse, withdrawing some folded bills and flattening them on the counter.
“Enjoy him while he’s little,” Sam told her. “Before you know it, you won’t be able to snap those around his fat little butt. You ever need a babysitter, give me a call.”
“Shoot, I ain’t gonna be leaving him nowhere. Once I finally get my hands on that baby, I might not put him down long enough for him to learn to walk.”
Abby went out the door, jingling the bell, and the checker was only half through ringing up Sam’s order when Abby came running back in.
“You got to come help!” Her voice was breathless and frightened. “They’s a woman out on the bench there, sick, puking her guts up, and a little girl’s sitting beside her with blood running down her face. Something’s bad wrong.”
Chapter Six
Charlie blinked but her vision was so blurred she closed her eyes again. That’s when the nausea hit her. From out of nowhere, she was suddenly so sick to her stomach she was barely able to lean over in time to keep from spewing a noxious puddle of this morning’s toast, jelly and coffee into her own lap.
She heaved and heaved, the kind of sick you get from the worst hangover you ever had, the kind that makes your diaphragm muscles strain.
She heaved so violently she could barely get her breath, and all the while she heard a pulsing sound that didn’t really seem like a sound because she didn’t think she was hearing it with her ears. It seemed like the sound was inside her head, bouncing around from one side to the other like a tennis ball in an empty oil drum.
WHUM!
WHUM!
WHUM!
The rhythm seemed to be keeping time with her heaving and gasping.
She was unaware of her surroundings until she finally got her breath, gasped and tried to choke off the next wave of heaving.
The sound in her head gradually subsided to a steady Whum. Whum. Whum. Then whumwhumwhum. Softer, a background, the canvas on which emerging reality was painted.
It was hot. She was sitting in the sun, and when she looked up she had to squeeze her eyes shut and turn away
Then she heard Merrie’s voice, her tear-clotted voice, the sound of a child who has been crying for a long time. Charlie almost shook her head to get her bearings, but didn’t. She was absolutely positive that her entire skull was filled with blown glass, some kind of fragile crystal, thinner than an egg shell. Any sudden movement of it would …
Just thinking about a sudden movement could shatter it.
Everything was all wrong.
What was happening?
In an accident? A wreck?
Voices were speaking to her and she opened her squinty eyes.
Bad move. The world heaved and swayed when she did and the people leaning over her took on the proportions of images in a funhouse mirror.
People standing over her.
Where was she?
Where …?
She made herself open her eyes, made herself focus and discovered that fighting the vertigo and nausea helped to alleviate it.
There was a red-haired woman standing in front of her.
Where was she?
What is … where are …?
She couldn’t order words in her head enough to speak. Then someone called her name, part of it.
“… Charlie Ryan, aren’t you? Remember me, Sam Sheridan?”
And then reality slammed down around her, the finality of a prison cell door banging shut.
She was sitting on a bench — somewhere … and Merrie was sitting beside her, crying.
Merrie!
Her mind snapped back into focus, a rubber band stretched to the limit and set free.
Merrie had tripped and hit her head. She was bleeding. Charlie had strapped her into the car seat and …
That was it. The memories were gone after that, wiped clean.
She must have been in some kind of wreck … an accident.
Merrie was crying a listless sort of cry. There was enough dried blood on her face to indicate she’d either been attacked by an ax murderer, or had been an extra on the set of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Though most of the blood was dry, there was an oozing wound under a crude bandage on her forehead.
Charlie had put the bandage on. Had done the best she could to secure it, but there’d been only Band-Aids, no surgical tape, nothing to hold it to the wiggling, wailing child before she strapped the little girl into the car seat to take her—
She’d been on her way to the hospital, to the emergency room. And then …
Again, nothing.
“… need to get her stitched up …” a voice said.
She attended to the last, looked … really looked at the people around her. A woman with long, strawberry blonde hair blowing daintily in the breeze was down on one knee in front of Merrie, carefully examining the bandage. There was a skinny blonde woman there and an overweight teenage girl, but those two weren’t standing near her, and it was clear why. She had puked all over the ground around her. The smell of it caused nausea to roll back in, a wave stretching out up a sandy beach.
“Can you hear me, Charlie? Do you understand?”
That was the red-headed woman who looked familiar but Charlie couldn’t place her. Her voice was husky, low and soothing.
“We need to see to the little girl’s cut.”
Now there was somebody speaking sense.
“Yes, stitches. That’s where I was going when …”
Yeah, when what?
“Where am I?” She hated how much that soun
ded like every groggy heroine in every cheap movie who wakes up after fill-in-the-blank and can’t remember which guy she went home with.
But where was she?
“At the crossroads,” said the young woman with blonde hair and bad teeth.
“The Middle of Nowhere,” said the redhead who—
“Sam? Sam Sheridan?”
Charlie was surprised she was able to pull that name out of the memory banks because she surely had not laid eyes on the woman since the night of graduation from high school. Sam had played basketball.
Sam nodded, then asked, “What happened to your little girl?”
Reality was settling more permanently around her.
“She fell, tripped over a fallen limb in the driveway of her grandmother’s house. I was taking her to the emergency room when …”
She looked around.
“Where’s my car?”
The people standing in front of her all had the same I-got-no-idea-lady look on their faces.
Sam was taking over and that was a good thing because right now Charlie needed someone taking over.
“E.J.’s office is right there.” Sam pointed to the building next to the Dollar General Store. “He’s got supplies. We can clean her up, get that wound properly bandaged.”
E.J. … the name. Elijah Hamilton.
Sam had already gotten Merrie to her feet and she held her hand out to help Charlie to hers.
“I can butterfly it, make a sterile bandage. Or he can put in some stitches … and not have to worry that his patient’s going to bite him.”
Elijah Hamilton. A veterinarian.
She burped out a bleat of inappropriate laughter but couldn’t help it. A veterinarian. She’d been upset she couldn’t take Merrie to a pediatric plastic surgeon instead of an ordinary emergency room doctor and this woman was suggesting she let a guy who neutered dogs sew up the wound.
But she allowed herself to be helped to her feet, and didn’t protest because a person really needed to be in much more control of themselves, their faculties, and their memories to exert authority and Charlie was totally confused.